Dr. Norvig is no doubt a genius in computer science, and Udacity is certainly looking promising considering that it's able to hire such influential people... but that said, it doesn't look like he has any actual teaching experience, and educating is made up of a different skill set than computer science. Every teacher has to start off having never taught before, but nevertheless, this makes me a little hesitant—are my concerns legitimate or not?
He co-taught Intro to AI at Stanford last fall. I sat in on a few of his sessions. He was fine. Maybe not a Richard Feynman level lecturer, but few are.
He's also a superb technical writer, if you've read any of his books [1] or website blurbs [2].
I don't think the quality of his teaching ability will be an issue for anyone.
Edit: Obviously some disagree. My own personal opinion is to overlook and ignore presentation style, but others may need that to stay engaged. YMMV. Learning from Peter Norvig is quite enough in my case.
1985-1986 University of Southern California Assistant Professor
1986-1991 University of California, Berkeley Research Faculty Member
Fwiw, my personal prejudice: Peter Norvig teaches extremely well. I preferred him to Sebastian Thrun in the original AI class. He explains the essence of complex things in a very systematic way, which is what I look for in a teacher, but Norvig's calm and quiet approach (vs say Thrun's more apparent enthusiasm) may not be everyone's ideal.
I have to agree, I love Norvig's writing, but I was really underwhelmed with his teaching ability in ai-class. I though Thrun was a much more enthusiastic and elucidating teacher. It's also possible that Norvig and Thrun placed different priority on the course. PAIP is one of my favorite programming books, so I'm really surprised that someone that would write a text so well would have such a hard time getting that same energy to come across teaching.
I can't think of anyone with more to teach on good taste in programming. Admittedly that doesn't answer your question -- it's a different medium from the books he's done such a great job on. But where are you even going to find another course on this exact subject? I'm genuinely curious.
